Prime places

Introduction

A post-scarcity world could make many things dramatically cheaper. Advanced AI and robotics may reduce the cost of construction, energy, transport, manufacturing, healthcare, and even some forms of expertise. But abundance does not erase geography. Some places remain scarce because they are physically limited, climatically favourable, politically stable, culturally important, or simply beautiful in ways that cannot be copied at scale.

Prime places illustration 1 This matters for the wider AI bloom debate because it changes what competition looks like after basic material shortages ease. If food, consumer goods, and routine services become abundant, people may care even more about access to exceptional environments: safe coastal cities, temperate climates, clean ecosystems, historic neighbourhoods, resilient infrastructure, and socially vibrant regions. In that sense, abundance can intensify rivalry over prime places rather than dissolve it.

The future politics of flourishing may therefore centre less on who can afford basic necessities and more on who gets access to the most desirable locations, especially as climate change reshapes which regions remain comfortable, secure, and ecologically stable.

Why geography still creates rivalry

Economists have long argued that some goods remain scarce even in rich societies because their value depends on position, exclusivity, or limited physical supply. Fred Hirsch described these as “positional goods”: things whose desirability partly depends on the fact that not everyone can have them. [Cambridge University Press & Assessment]cambridge.orgUniversity Press & Assessment What is a positional good?Recovering Hirsch's insightsby JJ Tyssedal · Cited by 3 — Given that Hirsch intends his term 'positional goods' to cover goods subject to… [Wikipedia Prime geography is one of the clearest examples.]WikipediaPositional goodPositional goodPositional goods are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there…

There is only so much land with all of the following at once:

Mild weather
Low disaster risk

Reliable water
Attractive landscapes
Economic opportunity
Political stability
Strong institutions
Cultural prestige
Existing infrastructure
Social networks and amenities

A world with abundant automated construction still cannot create unlimited Mediterranean coastlines, alpine lakes, historic city centres, or temperate islands with stable governments. AI may help build excellent new cities, but it cannot fully reproduce the accumulated geography and history that make some places uniquely valued.

This is already visible today. Wealthy global cities remain expensive despite decades of technological progress. Digital communication did not eliminate demand for London, New York, Singapore, or Tokyo. In many cases, technology increased the rewards for clustering talented people together.

Economists call this the “agglomeration effect”: the productivity gains that arise when skilled workers, institutions, investors, universities, and industries concentrate geographically. Research on remote work suggests these forces weaken somewhat when digital collaboration improves, but they do not disappear. [Munich Personal RePEc Archive]mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.deMunich Personal RePEc ArchiveThe Effect of Working from Home on the Agglomeration…May 24, 2022 — by S Liu · 2022 · Cited by 49 — We an…Published: May 24, 2022 [City Journal]city-journal.orgremote work and urban wages14 Oct 2022 — Glaeser has explained, cities offer agglomeration effects that boost productivity, and thereby wages, as people and ideas c…

Even if AI systems handle much knowledge work, humans may still prefer dense cultural and social environments where opportunity, prestige, creativity, and relationships cluster together.

Remote work changes geography less than many expected

During the pandemic, many observers predicted that remote work would permanently dissolve superstar cities. Some movement away from expensive urban centres did occur, especially toward suburbs and smaller regional cities. But evidence suggests that most migration remained geographically close to major metropolitan hubs rather than dispersing evenly across entire countries. [Economics Online]economicsonline.co.ukEconomics Online The Geography of Remote Work: Are Cities Losing TheirEconomics OnlineThe Geography of Remote Work: Are Cities Losing Their…December 19, 2025 — 19 Dec 2025 — Many remote workers who moved…Published: December 19, 2025 [WBR]wesleyanbusinessreview.comWBRAgglomeration: A Defense of the Remote Worker — WBR9 Dec 2025 — The rise of remote work has transformed not only firms but also urban…

That pattern matters for post-scarcity futures.

If even a large shift toward online work did not fully dissolve the attraction of high-opportunity regions, a more automated economy may still preserve strong geographic hierarchies. People may no longer need to live near factories or offices, but they may still compete for:

Beautiful natural surroundings
Elite educational ecosystems
Social prestige
Cultural scenes
Safety and governance quality
Climate resilience
Access to influential networks

In fact, as work consumes less of life, location quality may become more important rather than less important. A civilisation with more leisure, longer lifespans, and greater material abundance could place greater emphasis on where people actually spend their lives.

Prime environments may become more valuable in a warming world

Climate change may increase the scarcity of desirable land rather than reduce it.

Many regions already face intensifying heat, drought, wildfire, flooding, water stress, sea-level rise, or insurance instability. Climate researchers and real-estate analysts increasingly treat location-specific resilience as a major long-term economic factor. Savills Impacts 3OECD [UNEP Finance Initiative]unepfi.orgUNEP Finance InitiativeClimate Risks in the Real Estate SectorThis brief provides a baseline understanding of the key physical and transi…

That creates a new category of positional advantage: climate resilience.

In a future where advanced AI helps societies adapt to environmental pressures, some regions will still remain naturally easier, safer, or cheaper to protect than others. Places with moderate temperatures, abundant freshwater, lower disaster exposure, and strong infrastructure may attract growing demand.

The idea of “climate havens” reflects this emerging logic. Discussions around the Great Lakes region in North America, parts of northern Europe, elevated inland cities, and cooler coastal zones all reflect the expectation that future migration could increasingly follow environmental stability. [Hate The Game]hatethegame.substack.comHate The GameThe Climate Haven Theory: Is the Great Lakes Region the…March 23, 2026 — The Climate Haven Theory: Is the Great Lakes Reg…Published: March 23, 2026 [Russell Max Simon]russellmaxsimon.comRussell Max SimonHow to find a climate haven - by Russell Max Simon14 Oct 2022 — A climate haven is a sustaining property, in a resilient…

Importantly, this does not mean climate collapse makes most land uninhabitable. Human societies are highly adaptive. Wealthy regions can use engineering, cooling systems, water infrastructure, and AI-assisted planning to remain functional under difficult conditions. But adaptation costs are uneven.

A city requiring massive flood barriers, expensive cooling, wildfire defence, desalination, and insurance subsidies is fundamentally different from one that remains naturally temperate and water-secure.

The result may be a widening premium on naturally resilient geography.

AI could both soften and sharpen these pressures

Advanced AI could reduce some geographic inequality by:

Improving climate forecasting
Optimising water systems
Designing resilient buildings
Accelerating clean energy deployment
Enhancing disaster response
Making harsh environments more habitable

But these same tools may also make prime places more obviously valuable.

Better prediction systems could identify long-term safe zones earlier. Wealthy investors and governments may compete aggressively for stable land, freshwater access, and strategically resilient regions. Insurance markets may increasingly differentiate between high-risk and low-risk areas. Some vulnerable regions could face declining investment as capital shifts toward safer territory.

Evidence from climate-risk modelling already suggests that housing affordability and insurance pressures are becoming entangled with environmental risk. [The Guardian]theguardian.comThe study, which modeled two decades of public housing data under various climate outcomes, found that vulnerable groups—especially rente… [Savills Impacts]impacts.savills.comSavills ImpactsAdaptation or obsolescence: real estate on the front line of…Climate change makes buildings more expensive to operate a…

In other words, AI abundance does not necessarily flatten geography. It may instead make geographic quality more economically legible and therefore more contested.

Prime places illustration 2

Some places are valuable because history cannot be automated

Not all scarcity is environmental. Some places are scarce because they embody accumulated human history.

A medieval district in Florence, a Kyoto temple district, or a centuries-old London neighbourhood cannot simply be mass-produced by advanced manufacturing. Their value comes partly from continuity, symbolism, memory, architecture, and cultural concentration.

Even if virtual reality becomes extremely immersive, many people will still want physical presence in culturally important locations. Tourism already demonstrates this. Digital images of Venice did not eliminate demand to physically visit Venice.

This creates another important feature of post-scarcity rivalry: authenticity.

People often value experiences more when they are tied to real places, traditions, and communities rather than infinitely reproducible simulations. A civilisation flooded with artificial abundance may place higher value on things perceived as irreplaceable, rooted, or historically continuous.

That may increase preservation pressures:

Historic districts may become more protected
Environmental conservation may intensify
Access restrictions may grow
Tourism quotas may expand
Land-use conflicts may sharpen

The paradox is that technological abundance can increase appreciation for the non-replicable.

Scarcity after abundance may become more political than technical

In a highly productive AI economy, the central question may not be whether enough housing can physically be built. It may instead be who gets access to the best locations.

That shifts scarcity from pure production toward governance.

Several different systems are possible.

Open access and large-scale building

One possibility is that societies dramatically expand housing supply around desirable areas using AI-assisted planning and automated construction.

If building becomes extremely cheap, governments could:

Upzone high-demand cities
Build dense transit infrastructure
Create new garden cities
Expand coastal protection
Develop high-quality public housing
Reduce artificial zoning constraints

In this scenario, abundance partially diffuses prime-location privilege by increasing access to desirable regions rather than treating scarcity as fixed.

This would still not eliminate competition entirely, but it could reduce exclusion.

Prime places illustration 3

Fortress geography

Another possibility is that wealthy individuals, corporations, or states increasingly restrict access to resilient and desirable territory.

[This could happen through:]oecd.orgmanaging climate related risks for resilient real estate fe6a5ab0Managing climate-related risks for resilient real estate24 Dec 2025 — This chapter explores how actors in the real estate sector manage c…

Exclusionary zoning
Gated communities
Climate migration restrictions
Foreign ownership controls
Privatised infrastructure
Algorithmic pricing systems
Resource nationalism

In that world, AI-driven abundance for goods coexists with intensified inequality around land and location.

Some critics of techno-optimist futures worry this outcome is more likely than universal flourishing: material plenty combined with increasingly stratified access to safety, beauty, and stability.

Shared stewardship models

A third possibility involves treating prime environments more like protected commons.

Governments or international institutions could:

Expand public coastal access
Protect ecological reserves
Limit speculative land capture
Build universal housing systems
Tax land value more aggressively
Use sovereign wealth funds or public trusts
Guarantee baseline geographic mobility

This approach draws partly on traditions of commons governance associated with scholars such as Elinor Ostrom, who argued that shared resources often require institutions, norms, and collective management rather than pure market allocation. The challenge is that attractive land becomes more politically sensitive as its scarcity increases.

Why this matters for the long-term future

The broader AI bloom vision imagines a civilisation where humanity transcends many historical limits: disease, extreme poverty, exhausting labour, and perhaps even biological ageing itself. But flourishing is not only about output or consumption. It is also about where and how people live.

Prime places remain scarce because humans are embodied beings living on a finite planet with uneven geography, ecosystems, climates, and histories.

Even if future technology allows:

Near-zero marginal manufacturing costs
Cheap clean energy
Automated infrastructure
AI tutors and doctors
Radical scientific acceleration

…people will still compete for:

The safest coasts
The most beautiful valleys
The most liveable cities
The most stable climates
The strongest institutions
The richest cultural environments

That means post-scarcity politics may increasingly revolve around stewardship, access, migration, urban governance, environmental preservation, and land allocation.

The central lesson is not that abundance fails. It is that abundance changes what matters. When survival becomes easier, the remaining constraints become more visible. Geography is one of the deepest of those constraints because some forms of place cannot be copied, no matter how advanced civilisation becomes.

Endnotes

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Title: University Press & Assessment What is a positional good?
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Recovering Hirsch's insightsby JJ Tyssedal · Cited by 3 — Given that Hirsch intends his term 'positional goods' to cover goods subject to...
Source: Wikipedia
Title: Positional good
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good
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Positional goodPositional goods are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there...
Source: city-journal.org
Title: remote work and urban wages
Link: https://www.city-journal.org/article/remote-work-and-urban-wages
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14 Oct 2022 — Glaeser has explained, cities offer agglomeration effects that boost productivity, and thereby wages, as people and ideas c...
Source: wesleyanbusinessreview.com
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WBRAgglomeration: A Defense of the Remote Worker — WBR9 Dec 2025 — The rise of remote work has transformed not only firms but also urban...
Source: oecd.org
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Source: cambridge.org
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Positional GoodsIt emerges, I hope that Social Limits to Growth is a title which understates the scope of Hirsch's positional economy. Th...
Source: oecd.org
Title: managing climate related risks for resilient real estate fe6a5ab0
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Published: May 24, 2022
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Economics OnlineThe Geography of Remote Work: Are Cities Losing Their...December 19, 2025 — 19 Dec 2025 — Many remote workers who moved...

Published: December 19, 2025
Source: unepfi.org
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UNEP Finance InitiativeClimate Risks in the Real Estate SectorThis brief provides a baseline understanding of the key physical and transi...
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Hate The GameThe Climate Haven Theory: Is the Great Lakes Region the...March 23, 2026 — The Climate Haven Theory: Is the Great Lakes Reg...

Published: March 23, 2026
Source: russellmaxsimon.com
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Russell Max SimonHow to find a climate haven - by Russell Max Simon14 Oct 2022 — A climate haven is a sustaining property, in a resilient...
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The study, which modeled two decades of public housing data under various climate outcomes, found that vulnerable groups—especially rente...
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of Consumer CulturePositional goods were defined by Fred Hirsch as those goods whose value for the consumer who owns them depends more on...

Additional References

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on the fate of smaller cities, towns and villages in...by NP Makarem — This article is about imagining the future of smaller cities, tow...
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Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J2GjGixcQc
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Is the Great Lakes Region the Ultimate Climate Haven for...62% of US homes face high heat risk. Wildfires and floods put $15 trillion in...
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These areas are safer and more valuable, making them good investments for climate-...Read more...
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Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307811405_The_Nature_History_and_Significance_of_the_Concept_of_Positional_Goods
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fixed or near-fixed in supply and argues for the usefulness of this concept.Read more...
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e planning protects assets, reduces risk, and strengthens long-term...
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Limits to Growthby AN Shulsky · 1978 — Once their basic material needs are satisfied, individuals pursue what Hirsch calls "positional go...
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Fred Hirsch spends roughly the first half of Social Limits to Growth attempting to explain why economic growth has had such...Read more...
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Social Limits To Growth - Lessons for a post-crash economy23 Nov 2017 — But Fred Hirsch's main argument was that, even at the time, socie...